CURRICULUM TO PREPARE ENGLISH LEARNERS

Curriculum to prepare English Learners

Curriculum to prepare English Learners

Teachers should consider how students' listening comprehension ability will depend on the adjustment of the input types, students receive (Gass and Selinker, 2001). It is easy to understand why so many foreign language teachers prefer to hold the class itself, or assign students to use revenues from the acquired in structured situations with their classmates that the verification method. But the fact that this type of environment is very different from what the students have experience in everyday life, which puts them at a disadvantage to their advantage to acquire new language skills. Limited learning environment, students may be unable to realize or even have access to the signals of normal speech, nonverbal signals, or other models that are commonly found in its native environment. These and other factors are numerous and should be considered by teachers and students (Feyten, 1991, 173).

Theories

A language curriculum is understood as the diverse activities that take place at a language institution, such as what students learn, how they learn, how teachers teach, what materials teachers use, how assessment of language learning is conducted, what administrative support is provided to the teachers, where the teaching is conducted, and others (Richards, 2001). Tyler (1949) described curriculum elements as (1) educational purposes to be attained, (2) learning-teaching experiences to be provided, (3) how those experiences are organized, and (4) how it can be determined if the purposes in (1) are attained. Tyler's model can be summarized as a simple linear one that goes from aims and objectives to the selection of content, to the organization of language teaching, and to evaluation. Among thoseprocedures he includes analyze trainee and job needs; locate authentic materials; write or edit the materials focusing on vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric; write language exercises to teach the materials; edit the materials again; and pilot and evaluate the materials' efficacy. Moving away from the linear process suggested by Tyler, Nicholls and Nicholls (1972) suggested a cyclical curriculum design model that became known a ends-means. This model should be understood as one that focuses on finding out what language skills students need in order to accomplish a task in a specific role, and then get down to teach the language they need to fulfill their role. The endsmean model comprises the following steps: (1) the designing of the objectives of a language course based on the discovery of the language abilities students have, (2) the piloting of methods that most likely contribute to the achievement of the objectives, (3) the assessment of the work done in order to see if it has been effective, and (4) the analysis of feedback of all the process in order to provide a starting point for future research.

Even though the ends-means model has been widely accepted since the 1980s, a reduced and mechanistic set of guidelines and steps known as systems-design has gained prominence. Richards (2001) argued that this model sees the development of curricula ...